SOURCE: Davidson, Cathy N. “Kept Women in The House of Mirth.” Markham Review 9 (fall 1979): 10-3.

[In the following essay, Davidson discusses the options for women, particularly of Lily's class, in early-twentieth-century American society.]

Edith Wharton, while writing her first major novel, contemplated calling that work either “The Year of the Rose” or “A Moment's Ornament” but finally decided on The House of Mirth.¹ This choice, alluding to Ecclesiastes 7:4 (“the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”) and rich with metaphoric and ironic implications, is, as I will subsequently argue, clearly the wisest one. Yet the two earlier provisional titles also suggest something of the basic plight of the novel's protagonist and the general predicament of women in the society that Wharton portrays. Lily Bart, who has no fortune of her own, is defined by the monied aristocracy of fin de siècle New York primarily in terms of her potential as an ornament and as a beautiful setting for expensive adornments.² As such, the duration of her season is, like that of a rose, definitely limited: unless a suitable marriage establishes her as a lady presiding over an establishment of her own, her existence is necessarily precarious. Her chief concern should therefore be to market, to her best advantage, her only asset—her flower-like beauty.

Yet one of Wharton's main themes in The House of Mirth is the private cost of attempting to subscribe to that public myth, the beauty ethic. Lily, who is shown to be both more perceptive and less selfish than those who uncritically accept the customs of their class, cannot fully deceive herself into believing that the surfaces she works so hard to keep so brightly polished are truly the most valuable aspects of her being. But in her crass world where feminine beauty is regularly bartered for economic security, her “finer” sensibilities prove to be a definite liability. Indeed, the author shows that Lily's ambivalence, a clear understanding of how the game should be played as opposed to a wavering desire to rebel against its constraining and demeaning rules, largely contributes to her social decline and eventual demise. She cannot resolve the claims of self-interest and self-respect, a quandry that damns her society as much as it damns her. Only in a corrupt system can survival require the sacrifice of personal integrity, and, as the novel shows, Lily must finally choose between lanquishing morally in the house or physically in the street. Lily's fall also relates to another factor beyond her control. When the novel opens, the protagonist is twenty-nine years old. During the two years that the book encompasses, she passes, still unwed, into her thirties, a difficult age for a jeune fille à marier. From this perspective, the book is an account of Lily's struggle to survive despite the “planned obsolescence” that her society prescribes for women. And physically, Lily does decline. Near the end of the novel, when she rises to almost heroic stature—deciding she will face poverty and “dinginess” rather than compromise her own moral code by resorting to almost justifiable blackmail—she has also become, quite understandably, a woman rather gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes and lines around her mouth. Her beauty is no longer purely physical and immediately obvious—as the cliché would have it, only skin deep. Consequently, for most of her associates, it is completely hidden. Older, less attractive, Lily merits no notice. She dies unrecognized, and her death, as much as her life, demonstrates the wastefulness of a society which subsists on surfaces and forms.³

Women, Wharton shows in The House of Mirth, are constrained not just by the dubious beauty ethic of society but also by the prevailing double standard of the time. Consider Jack Stepney, a character who, in basic ways, is his cousin Lily's double. He too seeks to rise above genteel poverty to a different gentility more firmly founded in affluence. To do so, he easily marries one of the wealthy Van Osburgh girls. Yet his female counterpart could only with great difficulty effect an equally profitable match. As Lily observes: “All Jack has to do to get everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance, when one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time.”⁴ That difference is especially unfair because, as Lily early comments to Lawrence Selden, a “man may” marry but “a girl must” (12). Within their social milieu, an extra bachelor is always welcome while an as yet unclaimed marriageable girl can become, for all, a social encumbrance.

The double standard operates in other ways, too. Women in the society Wharton depicts, even wealthy women, are all socially and economically dependent on men. This dependency is partly fostered by society's denying the “fair sex” any real education. Herself the product of a “proper” upbringing, Edith Wharton knew that boys were liberally educated and prepared to find places for themselves in the larger world but that girls were trained only in the arts and graces necessary to achieve a suitable marriage.⁵ The upper-class women portrayed in The House of Mirth are obvious products of such pedagogical practices. They invariably know nothing of money except how to extract it by crude sexual maneuverings and are kept ignorant of the ways in which fortunes are made or spent even when those fortunes are their own. Like Lily, they are all trained for only one occupation, that of glorified housekeeper and social manager. As Selden rhetorically asks: “Isn't marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?” (9). The answer to both questions, unfortunately, must be “yes.” A well-born woman should be an economic parasite who trades on sex and her ability to display advantageously the wealth that she does not earn.⁶

Wharton fully illustrates the necessary consequences of this system. Even women who have married well, she shows, must continue to woo their husbands for material favors, while those independently wealthy before matrimony seem after marriage to depend like children on gifts and allowances provided by paternal spouses. Not surprisingly, none of the upper-class inhabitants of The House of Mirth is happily married. At best, like Gus and Judy Trenor, the most socially prominent among those whom Lily encounters, they merely coexist. Judy is quite willing to let sundry female friends “entertain” her husband but resents their extracting, for their favors, too high a price from the gullible, lascivious Gus. Other wives such as Bertha Dorset evince a more active discontent. She engages in affair after affair but always maintains some cover to keep her wealthy spouse placated and paying the bills. Lily, moreover, is herself the product of an emotionally sterile marriage. When her father faced complete financial ruin and was succumbing to hopeless despair, the mother felt only anger and disgust: “To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfill his purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated train to start” (33). Sympathy, concern, trust have no place in these marriages at all. As Judith C. Montgomery perceptively observes, the “house of mirth” is essentially a genteel house of assignation wherein the buying and selling of feminine charm masquerade as courtship, marriage, and love.⁷

Yet this upper-class society perpetrates myths of respectability and hypocritical codes of conduct. The morally initiated can carefully lock aside when men and, to a considerably lesser extent, married women violate asserted dicta. In other words, even within the larger demarcations of what is good for the goose but not for the gander, another lesser but equally pernicious double standard prevails: “the tiresome distinction between what a married woman might, and a girl might not, do” (79). If the former somewhat discretely violates the asserted standards of connubial faithfulness and decorum, polite society will politely look away. The unwed “girl” (the term girl applies to any unmarried but “marriageable” woman), must, however, remain always at moral attention. She may not enter, even in daytime, a man's apartment; she cannot borrow money (which, of course, would be borrowed from a man); she should not flirt. The novel, in fact, opens with Lily Bart alone in a railroad station, trying to decide how to pass the time until her next train departs. She needs a man to attend her, since, presumably, a twenty-nine year old “girl” should not be seen unescorted or unchaperoned on a Monday afternoon. But then, when Selden arrives in time to “rescue” her, she must refuse his offer to join him for tea at Sherry's. That action might also invite censure by her social set. People could talk, and as Lily later acknowledges, “the truth about any girl is that once she's talked about she's done for” (226).

The narrative perspective of The House of Mirth effectively emphasizes how much social hypocrisy pervades Lily's world. Because we are allowed to see the processes of the protagonist's thinking and the workings of her conscience, we know that she is morally superior to the other characters who inhabit her circle. Nevertheless, for various insignificant or, worse, fancied transgressions, Lily is “condemned and banished … without trial” (300). The word of a wealthy married woman (even though everyone knows of Bertha Dorset's myriad extra-marital liaisons) must take precedence over the protestations of any single girl not heiress to a fortune. Lily knows her world and its “rules” of evidence:

What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her.

(226)

The accused is ostracized for merely seeming to do what the accuser obviously does.⁸ Lily's “trial” thus becomes a “test case” by which the society that judges her can itself be judged. By the novel's end, we must see how the standards of the elite are imposed arbitrarily and unfairly. Wealth and social status rule, pretend to morality, but in The House of Mirth, that morality, like marriage, is only expediency in masquerade.

The morés of this high society reflect the pettiness and inconsistency of those who profit by and uphold the system. Women, of course, are the most obvious victims of the various double standards. It might, therefore, seem incongruous that women are also shown as the ones most ruthlessly devoted to maintaining those same dubious rules. But Wharton, as social psychologist, is here particularly astute. A society that expects women to compete against one another for a very few positions of prestige cannot encourage friendship, trust, and mutual sharing among women. Instead, jealousy must govern their relationships with one another. No woman—not even a married woman—can really feel secure. Why should George Dorset continue his life with Bertha if, by proving her an adulteress, he can obtain a divorce and wed the prettier, younger, and apparently more sympathetic Lily Bart? So a Bertha Dorset, for all her extramarital promiscuity, must be keenly aware of her expendability. An unwed, attractive, and usually younger woman is a potential threat to even a social grande dame.⁹

Lily, who is, as everyone knows, living beyond her means and who is also running out of eligible bachelors, must, therefore, be viewed as a rival, even by her “friends.” Those who appear solicitous, like Judy Trenor, still spend a good deal of their time lecturing Lily on the necessity of matrimony and, through obvious matchmaking, trying to usher her into that happy state. Less friendly types overtly attempt to remove a possible competitor from their social circle—and from the reach of their husbands—by means of malicious gossip. Paradoxically, Lily's physical attractiveness, the very thing that promises her a place in society, also renders her a definite threat to those who have made their way before her, a fact that explains their readiness to condemn her. In this sense, too, the beauty ethic helps to destroy Lily Bart.

Wharton, however, does not present any outright condemnation of the women whose self-interested tale-bearing fosters Lily's fall. They are, themselves, simultaneously victims and victimizers, too pitiful to be villains. Moreover, these upper-class women cannot be merely the protagonist's antagonists. She too is one of them. Indeed, each one reflects (usually as a distorted image) certain aspects of Lily's situation and thereby more fully demonstrates the limited dimensions of different rooms that they each inhabit in the “house of mirth.” Judy Trenor, for example, spends her whole life oscillating between boredom and a tedious preoccupation with trivial social engagements. Her main emotion is “hatred” for any other woman who might give a more impressive houseparty, while her husband and marriage elicit only indifference. After “some forty years of futile activity,” she can “exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd” (40). As Judith Fetterley points out, this “deadly” marriage provides “an image of Lily's future were she to marry someone like Percy [Gryce].”¹⁰ Lily, moreover, knows as much. Even during courtship she laments that she must woo him carefully, “must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life” (25).

If Judy Trenor's monotonous existence is the best that Lily can do, the other society women illustrate even less appealing paths that a relatively intelligent, sensitive woman might be forced to follow. Thus Bertha Dorset, without benefit of matrimony, has also loved Selden. Lily's relationship with this same character is somewhat irregular too, as is shown by her plea to Selden: “Ah, love me, love me—but don't tell me so!” (138). While he openly plays the secret lover, she could continue to search for a more suitable mate. Like Bertha, Lily thrives on the attentions of poetic, sensitive men who might value in her the qualities that a dull husband would disregard. And just as Bertha Dorset represents a certain emotional amorality, so too does Carry Fisher embody an ability to cut financial corners that Lily also partly shares. Judy Trenor, addressing Lily, describes this divorcée as a “perfect vulture” who is “always getting Gus to speculate for her” (86), profitting when he wins but never paying him back when he loses. This assessment of Carry equally applies to Lily, who also profits from Gus's “generous” speculation. Furthermore, Carry's serving, while temporarily out of a husband, as cicerone to those who would enter high society parallels Lily's later maneuvering for some position such as social secretary which would allow her, like Carry, to remain on the level to which she was accustomed. She too can be a social parasite. Both Bertha and Carry are simply further down a road that Lily well might follow but that leads, Wharton suggests, ultimately nowhere.

Even after her fall from social grace, Lily is not safe. Her continual attempts to regain her lost social status indicate that she remains vulnerable, still tempted by the opulent life of the upper classes. Here too, on the periphery of the monied aristocracy, Lily encounters partial parallels, characters in whose condition she should see something of her own. Both Mrs. Bry and Mrs. Gormer are crude social climbers who count on Lily to help them rise to the higher level from which she has just been excluded, and both are willing to discard her when and if she can no longer serve them. But Lily treats others, notably Sim Rosedale, in precisely the same manner. In fact, Lily also tries to use the two women just mentioned in much the same fashion as they would use her and, were she to regain her former footing, could be expected to discard them, too.

But it is Norma Hatch, another creature of the social demimonde, who provides the most unflattering image of what Lily might have become. Mrs. Hatch's crude plot to catch the youngest heir to the Van Osburgh millions and her tactics of playing the temptress who can be had by marriage are all obviously modelled on the practices of her supposed social superiors. This appalling woman does very little that Lily has not tried to do and, indeed, that nearly every married woman in high society has not succeeded in doing. Her husband-hunting is simply the ethos of the well-married and the would be well-married put into blatant practice.

Lily, in one of her infrequent moods of introspection, sees the validity of these contrasts and recognizes how much she resembles some of her counterparts. She laments to Gerty Farish: “But I am bad—a bad girl—all my thoughts are bad—I have always had bad people about me. Is that any excuse? I thought I could manage my own life—I was proud—proud! but now I'm on their level—” (164). Perhaps Lily can be somewhat excused for her shortcomings precisely because of the company she keeps. After all, the world in which she has been raised allows little room for moral feelings or finer sensibilities. Society, Wharton seems to suggest, must partly corrupt even those who are its victims and who come to understand the ways in which it works.

Selden, however, is hardly correct when he claims, “The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life” (70). With his usual insensitivity to issues outside his immediate ken, this character fails to note that the women in his world have no other form of work. Society cannot be a diversion when there are no occupations from which to be diverted. Thus a Judy Trenor can, in complete seriousness, exclaim of her maid: “She says her sister is going to have a baby—as if that were anything to having a house-party!” (41). These women must “work” to perpetuate society. In a sense, their seemingly ruthless exclusiveness, their designing attempts to limit what is accepted and who acceptable, even the hypocritical devices by which they would banish any who might prove a threat are all ways of defining themselves, of—at least socially—staying alive.

No one knows this more than Lily Bart. After the deposition of her aunt's will is read, an action by which Lily is publicly disinherited, she is not insulted or even shunned. So far as almost all of her former associates are concerned, she simply no longer exists. She goes to live—and die—in a boardinghouse barely half a mile from the scene of her greatest social triumphs, and only Rosedale (and he reluctantly) ever visits her there.¹¹ The men are too busy wheeling and dealing to remark her absence. The women, who have no business except to maintain the artificial world of society, simply do not see beyond the circumference of their own tightly drawn social circle. And perhaps their failure represents Wharton's most damning indictment of those who inhabit the house of mirth. For these pathetically limited humans, there can be neither other houses nor other life beyond the narrow confines of their own drawing rooms.

Lily alone, admittedly with great reluctance, leaves the constraining mansion to enter the wider world. Here, too, she encounters unflattering reminders of what she has—or could—become. As Lily herself sees, her predicament as a social nonentity resembles the situation of the lonely, bankrupt Silverton sisters. With few prospects and no training, they too face an uncertain future and, like Lily, they come to Gerty Farish for assistance and solace. Lower on this lower level is the dull, insidious Grace Stepney who hangs on as a poor relative until she can dubiously connive her way to position and affluence. Finally, on the lowest stratum of society, there is the charwoman who must resort to blackmail in order to support herself and her husband. Her predicament and the means by which she is willing to remedy it demonstrate graphically the depths to which Lily could descend. From Judy Trenor to this pathetic washer-woman, the author uses numerous subsidiary female characters to indicate the possibilities open to Lily Bart—which are mostly various paths to various falls. For the women of the rich, the house of mirth indeed becomes what Ecclesiastes promised, the house of mourning.

Notes

1. R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 155.

2. For an extended discussion of this aspect of the novel, see Judith Fetterley, “‘The Temptation to be a Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth,” Studies in American Fiction, 5 (1977), 199-211.

3. Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953), p. 55, emphasizes the degree to which Lily's society is based on waste.

4. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Scribner's, 1905), p. 48. Future references to the novel follow this edition and are made parenthetically within the text.

5. Lewis, pp. 34-35.

6. Marie Bristol, “Life Among the Ungentle Genteel: Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth Revisited,” Western Humanities Review, 16 (1962), 373.

7. Judith H. Montgomery, “The American Galatea,” College English, 32 (1971), 897.

8. Cf. Bristol, p. 373.

9. This paragraph is indebted to Fetterley, who has recently observed that “the patterns of hostility between women in The House of Mirth is a subject deserving of an essay in itself” (p. 203).

10. Fetterley, p. 205.

11. Percy Lubbock, in “The Novels of Edith Wharton,” Quarterly Review (Jan. 1915), rpt. in Irving Howe, ed., Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 50, criticizes Wharton for having Lily “vanish without more than a splash. … We feel that it would take even the Trenors more time than Mrs. Wharton allows them to ignore Lily so completely, with the splendor of her beauty languishing within five minutes' walk.” But Wharton, I would argue, has all along shown that Lily's social position was precarious—as her precipitous fall proves—and, moreover, provides us with no reason to expect characters such as the Trenors to show any concern for those suddenly fallen.